What is your point in noting that humans grow and maintain bones, gristle and organs?
The point is you made the claim for cows like it was a deciding factor. My point is, its not.
I didn't make any such claim about any "deciding factor." Moreover, your statement about humans growing and maintaining bodies seems to be entirely irrelevant to any issue under discussion here.
Apparently unlike you and
@David T, I can explain why I said what I have said here. In response to your post where you said you were unsure if “the methane emitted by 7 billion plus vegans would be more or less than the methane emitted by cows,” I noted: “It would be a significant reduction in methane emissions if humans ate a vegan diet. After all, most of the food that cows and pigs eat goes toward growing and maintaining bones, gristle, organs, etc., that humans do not eat.”
My comment was premised on propositions such as: the number of creatures whose annual sustenance requires the plants grown on 1000 acres each year will produce more methane than the number of creatures whose annual sustenance requires the plants grown on 200 acres per year. (Agree?) This proposition is roughly analogous to the situation that humans have created with livestock where "80 per cent of agricultural land is used to make livestock feed or for grazing". (
https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/tackling-worlds-most-urgent-problem-meat )
But the above proposition is disanalogous in several important ways, which accounts for the second sentence of my comment above. Among the livestock that humans raise and feed are large-bodied ruminants (1) who produce unusually large amounts of methane through inefficient enteric fermentation in multi-chambered stomachs, while (2) humans only eat a small portion of their bodies. It seems to me inarguable that less methane would be produced if humans merely acquired their calories directly from plants, rather than raising and maintaining the bodies of these ruminants for 2-8 years while they produce inordinate quantities of methane, and, in the end, humans only eat a small portion of their bodies. It seems to me that these further propositions surely enter into such facts as that “a quarter-pound Beyond Burger requires 99 per cent less water, 93 per cent less land and
generates 90 per cent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, using 46 per cent less energy to produce in the U.S. than its beef equivalent,” and that the “ Impossible Burger, developed by Dr. Patrick Brown, founder of PLoS, requires "approximately 75 per cent less water and 95 per cent less land,
generating about 87 per cent lower greenhouse gas emissions than beef burgers."
The underlined portions of the above quotations highlight the additional issue that it is certainly self-deceptive or somewhat diversionary to focus on methane emissions in evaluating even just the climate impacts of a vegan vs. commonplace “meat-eater” diet. In that comparison what is crucial is total GHG emissions in CO2e. We know from several reliable sources that a vegan diet wins that comparison hands-down.
But the non-underlined portions of the above quotations point to the further issues of other environmental impacts in the evaluation of a vegan vs. common “meat-eater” diet, particularly the highly important issue of water usage in food production for 7.5 billion humans. The other environmental impacts of a vegan vs. “meat-eater” diet also include factors such as other types of pollution, zoonotic diseases, and fishing the oceans to the point of collapse. Exactly as I said in my first 3 sentences on this thread:
One cannot logically deny the improvement to environment, including climate, and the massive reduction in suffering of trillions upon trillions of sentient creatures, if humans ate the plant-based diet that apes such as humans are biologically adapted to eat. One cannot logically deny the improvement to the environment, including climate, and the reduction in suffering of many sentient creatures, if the majority of humans were to simply change their diet today to something closer to a vegan diet. Nor can one logically deny the improvement in human health if either of the above conditionals were true.
